Why we started Ketch: deploy once, comply everywhere privacy

If you’re past a certain age, you can remember back to the dawn of digital advertising. It was chaotic and inefficient: each banner ad was crafted like a piece of artisanal chocolate and hard-wired onto each web page manually by an HTML coder. It took years to evolve into the fully automated ad-serving platforms we all take for granted today, where anyone with a website who wants to participate in the ad-driven economy can “set it and forget it.”

Data privacy today is in the same primitive, manual stage that digital ads were all those years ago. Companies think privacy is complicated to implement because there’s no technology yet to make it programmatic.

This is the problem we set out to tackle when we launched Ketch. Today we’re thrilled to emerge from stealth and to introduce our tech- and values-driven tools to the world.

Ketch automates data privacy and governance through a coordinated set of applications, infrastructure, and enabling API’s.

What makes us different from other data privacy and security companies is that we do the heavy lifting of enacting privacy “behind the screen.” We integrate consumer privacy preferences programmatically into internal systems and external platforms—customer relationship management, e-commerce, martech, analytics, and more.

For the past several years, we’ve watched with frustration as the debate over data privacy too frequently devolved into a zero-sum tradeoff: capture and use data to grow, or respect privacy but suffer the competitive consequences.

That choice seems crazy to us. Data compliance shouldn’t be a moral or operational dilemma. Sure it’s a challenge, but one that technology guided by clear principles and great architecture can solve.

As we got to work solving this challenge, we built Ketch on two core beliefs.

• First, privacy is an essential human right. On the heels of corporate data breaches and growing understanding of Big Tech’s disrespect of consumers’ data, citizens and governments demand that our right to privacy be honored, monitored, and enforced.
• Second, data is fuel for GDP and growth. As long as they follow the rules, businesses should be able to acquire and use data in above-board, ethical ways.

We reject the Sophie’s Choice that suggests a company can capture and use data to grow, or sacrifice advantage from data to comply. We see too many businesses overwhelmed by the proliferation of data regulations and the armies of well-meaning privacy lawyers explaining them all, without any means for enacting them into their own data systems.

As data management geeks, my team and I appreciate and understand the rules, but we decided it was time to build tools that respect the data rights of consumers and companies alike. We’re incredibly excited about how it turned out.

My co-founder, Vivek Vaidya, and I have spent more than two decades building leading data platforms, including Krux, acquired by Salesforce, and Rapt, acquired by Microsoft. And we’re thrilled to have secured $23 million in Series A funding from super{set}, CRV, Acrew Capital, Ridge Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank to help us and our team of DreamKetchers execute the sprawling vision and multi-year plan we’ve laid out for ourselves.

Ketch is live with dozens of happy customers today, and we stand ready to help your business embed trust and privacy into your core operations while harnessing data to fuel top-line growth. If you’re a doer who wants to help the world move from rules to tools that respect our data dignity and you’re looking for a new company-building opportunity, give us a call.

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